Quick notes from Tuesday's practice

ANAHEIM -- Some quick notes from the Ducks' practice on Tuesday at Honda Center ...

-- The Ducks met for about 20 minutes before hitting the ice and the point that Coach Randy Carlyle mainly wanted to get across was the defensive breakdowns that have plagued them in the losses to San Jose and Dallas over the weekend.

The goals that were highlighted were ones by the Sharks' Dany Heatley and Patrick Marleau that got them back in their eventual 4-2 win Saturday night and the two scores by Dallas center Mike Ribeiro that gave the Stars momentum in their 4-3 victory.

"If you look at the two goals that were scored [against San Jose], the first one that Heatley scored, we had five guys around him and we didn't take the body. The next one, there was nobody around Patrick Marleau. He was standing in front of the net all alone.

"That's not acceptable from a defensive aspect when you're playing this type of hockey. You can't get those freebies from those areas. You look at the goals from Dallas. The Ribiero goals he got, basically he was untouched. The [Brenden] Morrow goal was from a critical area. A little bit higher out. But those are goals that are preventable in our minds from positional play and we got out of position on that."

-- After Sunday's loss to Dallas, Carlyle emphasized that he wanted his players to "don't do anything" on Monday and not think about hockey. Some of them said they took him up on that and were glad to get a mental break from their daily push to grab one of the final playoff spots in the Western Conference.

"Oh yeah, I didn't do much," forward Corey Perry said. "I just laid around and relaxed. It was a quiet day."

Said Cam Fowler: "I didn't really move off the couch all day. If Coach says something, even if he doesn't exactly mean it literally, I took it for it is."

Perry said he could tell the day off helped when he arrived for practice.

"Just getting away from the rink," he said. "Getting away from anything, it just clears your head. Rejuvenate the body and mind. And it helps. It's nice to get one."

"It'll be at the top of the list," Carlyle said. "Again, we have to go out and compete to get back to playing more of the type of hockey that we're capable of for 60 minutes. We've played spurts over the last two games where we felt that we did a lot of things that we've been doing for a while. But it got away from us in some of the games. It showed on the scoreboard."

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